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Mr. V's North Star: Navigating Scholars Straight to College
“When our predecessors were sitting at lunch counters and going to jail, they couldn’t say ‘Excuse me, it’s five o’clock, I have to get home.’”
North Star Middle School Principal Jamey Verrilli, known as “Mr. V” to his students and colleagues, pauses for a moment before continuing his impromptu speech for one of the many groups of visitors to come through North Star Academy each week.
“We’re fighting a modern civil rights crusade. So our staff and teachers, they commit.”
They commit, yes – Verrilli certainly has longer than any other, having been the principal for 11 years and a teacher for two decades. But, unlike the tumultuous Civil Rights movement of the Sixties, Verrilli, his team of crusaders, and their bright, young students comprise a movement, on a day-to-day basis, of learning and laughter.
One day this spring, Verrilli’s part in the cause begins when he leaves his glass-walled office which looks out onto the cafeteria (“I live in a fishbowl”) and strides upstairs, clinking and jangling each step thanks to his mass of keys hooked onto a carabineer on his belt loop.
He reaches the classroom he’s covering for an absent science teacher and, after a look around the room, begins. He regularly teaches History and is winging this class, but watching him ask his students rapid-fire questions, you’d hardly notice. (Perhaps it goes back to his college days at Colby College, where he did a lot of acting – though he humbly admits that in Shakespeare plays, he was “always one of the lords or somebody, never anyone big.”) It seems second nature for him to make classes interdisciplinary and interactive. It’s not just about Science. As his students complete a worksheet on the platypus, he asks them...
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